The Agony of Liberation Theology

Abstract

The aim of this article is to understand why Liberation Theology remains in dispute, placed between life and death, in the condition of agony as its own place. To this purpose, it analyzes the malaise and misunderstandings that accompany it, especially contemporary ones. It seeks to situate Liberation Theology in its connection with history and today’s society in its conflicts and sufferings. This way, it seriously considers theological places as social and historical places and vice versa. It then deepens its epistemological vocation with the principle of liberation together with the principle of mercy and the principle of hope. It concludes with the internal approaches of this theology as Theologies for the Kingdom of God, affirmative theologies, and Theology of the God of the Kingdom, theology of kenosis, of God on the crosses of those who suffer.

1. Introduction

“Estase ardiendo el mundo y…no es tiempo ahora de tratar con Dios de negocios de poca importancia”

(St. Teresa, Camino de Perfección 1, 5)

[The world is burning and…is not the time now to deal with God on small matters’.]

(St Teresa, Camino de Perfección 1, 5)

It is not dead: there is a lot of talk in Brazil and also in other Latin American latitudes about Liberation Theology (LTh), and perhaps even more talk from its scathing critics, and with strong emotions, blaming it for almost all the ills, especially of the Church and the faith in general. If it were dead, there would not be so much emotion, often filled with distorted judgments, borrowed from third-hand readings, repeating ready-made refrains. If the world—the times we live in, this generation that has power today—were a just and upright world, as Gustavo Gutierrez used to say to his interviewers, LTh would finally be overcome. A theology of the freedom of the sons and daughters of God would be enough—a doxological theology—because the world should only and entirely be a great liturgy of praise, and theology would only be a light thought of pure gratitude. But the world is still a field of battle and tears, where songs of freedom and joy still clash. And there is no millenarianism with a date on the calendar that has not failed in its task of starting another possible world, the eschatological slogan of the World Social Forum. So there are different options: to live as refugees in a realm of fantasy and magic, even resorting to religious resources, or to fight brutally and cruelly to bring about a different world by our own hands, or to let cynicism take over and live a “let’s eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” (1 Cor 15:32), in short a range of tempting possibilities.

LTh is an ongoing possibility, part of a journey that has not just begun: faith in the form of following a God incarnate in history who exposes himself to the cries of those who suffer the weight of the injustices of this time, who goes out to meet them, who does not disconnect his mind from his heart and hands. On this path of following Jesus, a good Christian theology—this is LTh’s effort—unifies thought, feeling and action, and even puts its thought at the service of the same messianism that Jesus exercised, the Son of God found in human flesh. It is a theology of following Jesus, a messianic theology, a theology of the incarnation and, therefore, a theology of history. It is also a fundamental theology, in other words, a perspective, a language and a method that interprets and directs all realities according to its criteria. Ratzinger was right to teach his astonished readers that it is not a question of a theology standing alongside others and keeping to a restricted area, that of the Church’s social teaching, but whose claim is to reinterpret all of theology, all of thought, all of the Church, all of religion, in short all of reality illuminated by the principle of liberation (Müller 2025). It is this wholeness that forces a decision: either you are with it, within it, or you are outside it and against it. This, after all, is what causes the current “hatred of LTh”, with certain environments and groups only needing to name it to trigger emotion and point to it as the culprit for all the ills of the universe, a typical formation of expiatory victimization for even the most intimate or diffuse ills projected onto it.

In order to envision the way ahead for the LTh, we must first understand the current malaise that is overtaking the LTh and placing it in tensions and conflicts that are more complex than at the time of its initial formation (2). Since it is a messianic thought that involves incarnation and history, it is important to update the social contexts—political, cultural and religious—that are taking place today, with their trends for the near future, because they are “signs of the times”, or “theological places” that indicate where the fundamental epistemological criterion of the LTh is realized, the messianic option of Jesus: the gospel to the poor (cf. Lk 4:18). In other words, it is essential to consider God’s preferential pastoral option for the poor today, in the present time (3). Next, we will examine the “liberation principle” and its real liberating power to operate effectively, as well as the effectiveness of a theology that enhances liberation. In this sense, it positively assumes an ideological aspect, in other words, an articulated set of powerful ideas in view of the work and faithful struggle for liberation. And for this, every resource is needed, starting by adding the principle of mercy and the principle of hope to the principle of liberation (4). We conclude with a firm horizon for this often slippery path, the LTh as a theology for the Kingdom of God and its eschatological signs, pure and festive, while remaining faithful to the God of the Kingdom, still mistreated and crucified in the middle of the path to the Glory (5).1

The LTh has delved into a theology of fragility and the cross together with those who suffer and has expanded into a positive and affirmative theology of the diversity of creation in the hope of the full freedom of the sons and daughters of God. LTh grew and spread until it became the first truly planetary and ecumenical theology.

2. “Those Who Hate Cannot Tell the Reason for Their Hatred” (Letter to Diognetus 2025)

In order to have a future, it is necessary to have some clarity. The future of the LTh depends on its prophetic dimension, on its prophetic awareness. LTh is not a mere explanation, even if it would be an in-depth one, of the Church’s existing doctrine and magisterium. In its prophetic dimension, it draws on repressed and dangerous memories that shake the legitimacy and tranquility of the status quo, both socially or politically and ecclesiastically. In this sense, it carries with it a “prophetic denunciation”, and it becomes an uncomfortable thought. It has the intention of changing and even creating something new in the magisterium and in the actions and attitudes of the Church and society. It could sound like an arrogant claim if it thought of itself as the protagonist, but it is not like that, it is an “organic” aid, it does not intend to and cannot replace the main subjects of history’s transformations, the social movements. However, insofar as it speaks and raises awareness through the sacred resource of the Word of God, it has the vocation of a “prophetic proclamation” and is therefore a precious and necessary aid, albeit as a humble service. The dimension of prophetism and liberation are intrinsic to each other.

This is what provokes angry reactions, malicious interpretations, even by the CIA in the Santa Fe declaration, which saw LTh as Marxism disguised in religious language.2 It is not a case of dwelling on the facts but of understanding not only that “the poor will always be with you” (Jn 12, 8), with whom we have to confront, but also that “enemies will always be with you” and the entourage of consequences: distorted interpretations, persecution and contagious hatred. The atoning victim is thus formed, and martyrdom is already part of the history of LTh, just as it is part of the history of the prophets. Liberating action, which fights against the interests that disfigure and oppress human dignity, action with which a true LTh must be connected, is action against oppressions that are always up to date and of all kinds, old and new. This is how action is radicalized into holy combat, into struggle, into militancy.

Ontologically, struggle is a radical form of all action when it has to fight with strong and resistant material. Socially, it is “militant action”, like “military actions”, maneuvers and exercises in military struggle. But with a difference that is maliciously disregarded by the “enemies of LTh”, for it is militancy as resistance, as fidelity and hope, as an effort of solidarity in the liberation, justice and dignity of those subjected to various oppressions, identifying the Crucified in them. It is not voluntarist or arbitrary, it is not aggression, it is prophetic defense. Social class struggles—today also “identity struggles”, migratory struggles, ecological struggles, etc.—are not an invention or a transmutation of Marxism or any ideology. They are not born out of ideas. They are struggles to survive and overcome the weight of a reality already historically imposed by interests and privileges with the appearance of meritocracy, which are actually colonialist predations. In other words, crying injustices and unacceptable suffering are what give rise to true social struggles, not doctrines or hidden interests. Struggles for dignity, work, etc., are in the highest interests of the poor.

If in his encyclical letter Populorum Progressio, Paul VI recognized the right to revolution in the face of persistent and intolerable cruel regimes, the persistent and growing cruelty of the global economy and hegemonic politics, which take away the joy of living and anticipate the death of innocent people by sucking the veins out of their work and discarding multitudes, forcing us to endure the necessary struggle for liberation.3 It is a real ethical siege for those who still want to maintain real human dignity. And, by antonomasia, for those who are followers of the Messiah of Nazareth. This was the case, among countless examples, of Bishop Oscar Romero, assassinated in El Salvador while presiding at Mass in 1980, Sister Dorothy Stang, assassinated in the middle of the Amazon rainforest in 2005 while walking to a meeting, and so many others. They made their decisions and remained faithful in the “struggle”, resisting with the awareness of the danger of death, and they did not abandon their positions. They were fragile in their bodies but strong in their words. They are an inspiration for thinking about an updated LTh.

This solidarity “struggle” for justice in LTh has a method in which epistemological rigor begins before academic requirements. As the facts teach us, at the beginning of the 16th century, with Antonio de Montesinos and Bartolomé de las Casas, it begins by exposing oneself with all one’s senses and feelings to the cry that rises from the underground, from the peripheries. It is a self-exposure to the agony and the struggle without defenses for the minimum of life of those who are subjected to and abandoned by a system that does not listen, does not see, does not touch. To take up this agonizing struggle as Montesinos did, in a cry of agony and trembling that crosses the ocean, can be seen today in the monument erected in his memory on the Santo Domingo malecón—with his hand cupped over his mouth, open and tense in the direction of Europe.

At the beginning of the LTh is the cry of agony, in the etymological sense of a-gonia: “without angles” of defense, without walls or trenches, facing the enemy armed to the teeth, an entire army, a closed system that has “the power to liberate and to crucify” (Jn 19:10) and which logically, for its own sake, prefers to use its power for the death of the defenseless enemy. And yet, to remain in struggle in this agonized state, between life and death, logically knowing oneself to be the loser, in a struggle in solidarity for life and in agony in solidarity against death, this is the crucial place from which LTh always emerges, always agonizing.

Between the agonizing cry and the agonizing thought, there is the agonizing social movement that imposes itself. In this order, thought does not have the lightness of praise but the pain of “thinking wounds”, just as the verb to think is etymologically in the Latin languages, in its archeology. It is the agony of the defenseless poor that summons LTh to structure itself as an organic theology, which thinks with those who come together and organize themselves in a praxis and social movement that integrates indignation, non-conformity and, finally, the struggles for liberation.

Without the social and ecclesial movement, LTh becomes an internally coherent and logical discourse that is sterile and has no real impact. A history without a social movement is a pseudo-history, just the administration of sameness, of the inertia of institutions that wear away towards death because they lack the novum that feeds them and keeps them alive. It is illustrative to remember the pathetic case of Fukuyama, who declared in the 1990s, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, that history had come to an end and that the equilibrium of a liberal globalized society had been reached. He overlooked the voracious dynamism of capitalism.

Joseph Comblin notes the presence of the messianic Spirit in history through its signs in social movements (Comblin 2023). It is above all in the face of social movements and their transformative potential that the forces of the status quo become restless and look for the “guilty”. One example is the case of the first Christians, blamed for the unrest in Rome during the time of Nero. But, as the author of the Letter to Diognetus, 5, observes about the hatred of Christians in the second century: “those who hate cannot tell the reason for their hatred”. This hatred is generalized from the threat perceived in every liberation movement and naturally includes liberating thought. This is the case of LTh.

However, according to René Girard, Jesus’ observation that “they don’t know what they’re doing” (Lk 23, 24) because of the unanimous massification and without any distance to examine and reflect, since now we have the Gospel narrative at hand, is no longer possible. The Gospel teaches us to know what is done and what happens hidden behind this massive hatred that produces expiatory victims. The figure of the fox—Herod, the Rex Judaeorum—sowing the unanimity of the condemnatory sentence between the conflicting authorities to legitimize the death of the atoning victim, is, however, no longer the fox hidden but a “revealed fox”, taken out of his hiding place behind the backstage of Pilate’s stage, and is exposed. Just like Annas behind the high priest Caiaphas. Girard, after examining numerous narratives in the literature of different cultures, concludes that it is the Gospel narratives that fully unveil the mechanism of the formation of innocent victims through the creation of unanimity that allows them to be blamed with a good conscience and makes the mechanism of expiatory victims’ work. And, still according to Girard, modernity has so matured the awareness of revelation, which is originally the result of the Gospel narrative, to the point where it is no longer possible to make expiatory victims with a “good” conscience.

And so today full transparency is beginning to reign and, with it, cynicism. Today it is done in a shameless way and on a stage without a backstage, no longer able to hide the machinery of victimization. In other words, there is no longer any need for legitimizing ideologies for alliances between politicians, corporate businessmen, religious leaders, to safeguard and promote their privileges and accumulations at the expense of innocent victims. And also to cancel out on the media networks, persecute and silence, finally eliminating anyone who poses a danger. In these times of high-tech information and the power of manipulation and disinformation, the social movement has become easier to contain and eliminate. And those who give power to the social movement, those who elaborate a thought of struggle, and who are also agonizingly exposed, are now more easily silenced and eliminated. This is the case with LTh, as it is with all critical thinking and all leadership for alternatives.4

The madness and scandal of the cross are also the Christian proof for LTh, are the proof of fidelity to this agonizing condition, entirely vulnerable, in the face of the gigantic power of those who dominate the current stage of technological and financial capital, who are thirsty for creative destruction so that nothing and no one can stop their path, their power and their way of life, including in this agony those who think about liberation in its prophetic and evangelical character. In these circumstances, the word no longer has any power; dialogue would be a cynical staging and a mockery. Silence takes the place of the word and becomes, in turn, the ethical power of the prophets. This is the extreme case of Jesus himself.

Jesus remains silent in the face of certain questions from the authorities, not only from the high priest and Pilate, but also from Herod, who does not get a word out of him. Hieronymus Bosch depicts the scene in which Jesus looks away or at those who are looking at him from outside the painting, surrounded by his executioners, all of whom are glaring at him with ferocity. This is also the case, in the Gospel of John 8, when Jesus pauses in front of the accusations against the woman caught in adultery, not bending down to write—because we would know what he would have written if it had mattered—but writing on the ground to bend down. In other words, to take a distance, to remove his gaze from the contagion of unanimous gazes ready to condemn. And so, breaking the process of unanimous victimhood and opening up a path of salvation for the woman.

There are circumstances in which the LTh must know how to keep quiet, not get involved in debates with ready-made sentences and take a distance. Does this mean that the LTh is resigned to irrelevance? Only if it no longer touches current contexts that are theological places.

3. New Social and Ecclesial Contexts as Theological Places

At this point, to understand the importance of social places as theological places, it is also necessary to take into account the hermeneutical circle and, before it, the “heuristic” circle, as such a heuristic and hermeneutical circle applies to the New Testament, to Christ himself, and as it applies today in relation to the poor.

3.1. The Circle Between Social Place and Theological Place

In order to begin and to revisit what Melchior Cano established as theological places, we must first resort to the opened dynamism of the hermeneutic circle and, before that, what we would call the “heuristic circle”, with a certain Augustinian inspiration: to seek as one finds and to find as one seeks. Christian theology, which starts from the incarnation of the Son of God, is not, as Aristotle states, an absolutely pure metaphysics of a God who, in the final analysis, thinks and contemplates himself, thought in plenitude and in act without pause, ultimately the most perfect and hallucinated narcissism (Aristóteles 2002, Metaphysics 1114, 1000 b 3–9; 1072 b 18–24). Nor, as Hegel thought in the preface to his Principles of the Philosophy of Law, is theology reduced to the rationality of a history of the absolute spirit in which everything that is real is rational and vice versa. For then even war and injustice, which are painfully real, would be rationalized and ultimately justified. In theory also, Christian theology does not need either Marx or Heidegger to be a theology of “non-theology”, a theology of the body, of the flesh, of history and of the world.

A “pre-thematic theology”, which emerges in thought and becomes a theme, as Enrique Dussel (1999) insisted, is already to be found in the cry, in the clamor, in the pain that calls for thought, that provokes the first step of LTh, awareness saturated with reality. The Brazilian bishop Helder Câmara insisted, all over the world, on this first movement of thought, and he had someone to lean on: his exiled friend Paulo Freire. The brilliant pedagogue Paulo Freire, in turn, in a video recorded some time before his death, left a precious testimony for our subject. He said it was not Marx who took him to the outskirts and slums of Recife, in Brazil, or to the poor villages in the countryside, but his “comrade Christ” (sic). He then turned to Marx and his “extensions” as facilitators, to understand, through social analysis, including the beliefs of the poor, the most astonishing fact of that reality: the internalization of the gaze of the “captain of the bush”—a figure that evokes a slave master on the hunt for fugitives—i.e., the oppressor in the mind and gaze of the oppressed. And the belief in God as heart and consolation in a heartless society. Paulo Freire, in his Pedagogy of the oppressed (Freire 1987), that at the same time seeks to understand this alienating internalization, seeks ways of raising awareness and the path to liberation. But, says Paulo Freire in the video testament, he himself continued in the company of his “comrade Christ” in his work and his wanderings among the poor. In this video, he bears witness to the circle between faith and liberation (Freire 2025).

Thus, before being a hermeneutic circle, the TLh is a “heuristic” circle, of searching, that is, of seeking understanding, in order to then become a hermeneutic circle, that is, of interpretation: faith seeks to understand and interpret, and understanding makes faith stronger and faithful and interprets it better. It is not a circle between faith and reason according to the Hegelian dialectic, a dialectic that Hegel developed without any problems of conscience with his subservience to the Prussian princes and, between distortions, calmly arrived at the supremacy of the Prussian race, the matrix of modern white supremacism. Nor, unlike Marx, does he reduce faith to a superstructure caused by material and economic reality. Nor does he adhere to a pedagogical method of class struggle to tread the path of liberation, in which violence becomes a closed circle of destruction. The great social movements of the 20th century that had religious inspiration and bore fruit—such as those that emerged from Tolstoy, Gandhi, Luther King, the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil—bear witness to the possibility of liberation with the triumph of peace, with firm methods of active non-violence. Those who accuse the LTh of enshrining the class struggle and, consequently, violence, have not really read its authors.

Nevertheless, it is hard to understand Clodovis Boff, one of the first thinkers of LTh, with his deep and complete knowledge of it, an authority on LTh, who disregards the meaning of the hermeneutic circle. Ha insists on considering LTh only a “theology of the political”, a specific and second-order sphere, since the first order would be, let us say, the “theology of God”, the search for God and Christ, in a linear order of primacies (Boff 2023). But God, according to Christian knowledge, has always been God Incarnate, the Son who, in his earthly condition—Jesus of Nazareth—and his mission among a people, his consequent crucifixion and his resurrection from the dead, thus makes known together who God, the Father and the Spirit are. In other words, not the linearity that hierarchizes but the heuristic and hermeneutic circle that takes place from the beginning between God and the world, between the interests of the spirit and those of this earth, between Jesus and the good news to the poor, whatever the starting point within the circle. It is in this same sense that conversion to God and ecological conversion today take place in a circle that invites us to bend down our hands to the earth as much as we raise our hands to the heavens.

Ellacuría (2024, pp. 84–88) and Sobrino (2006, pp. 26–38) make an internal distinction in the theological places classically listed by Melchior Cano: there are places that are sources, such as Scripture and the Magisterium. And there are places that are of the order of social reality. According to them, the social place should be considered appropriately “theological places”, while Scripture or Magisterium should simply be considered “sources”. Jared Wicks, in fidelity to the theology of the Second Vatican Council, also updates Melchior Cano, commenting on the current meaning of the classic theological places and “obviously other combinations and configurations are possible”, making it possible to rediscover, for example, at least two indisputable theological places that are not explicitly mentioned in Cano: the lex orandi lex credendi of the liturgy and the local Churches (Wicks 1994, pp. 551–52). But the unavoidable hermeneutic circle in the LTh is between Christ and the poor, the identification of the Lord with the victims and oppressed according to Matthew 25. Clodovis, the former theologian of the LTh, accuses the same LTh of replacing Christ with the poor: the poor would have taken Christ’s place. From a hierarchical and linear perspective—who comes first, then who comes second—with a care to distinguish rather than relate, theology would only touch the poor extrinsically. A theology without the real contexts, without the feet in the hard reality, from the struggle for bread and medicine, to respect for the dignity of sons and daughters of God, which intends to maintain itself in an unreal dualism, is a chronicle of death foretold.

The social contexts that become vox clamantis at the beginning of Montesinos’ sermon are signs of the times and theological places. They are not only voices that cry out, they can also be resources, as numerous documents from the magisterium of the Latin American bishops point out: popular culture and religiosity, ancestral traditions, accumulated wisdom, awareness of dignity and solidarity, in a list that can be extended.

The most far-reaching sign of the times, the broadest and most challenging theological place behind many others, and one that was not yet present to LTh in its first two decades, will increasingly be of an ecological nature. As we know, climate change is a consequence of the last few centuries of capitalist development, accompanied by the strengthening of nationalism and its respective colonialism. Decolonization is necessary to clear the way for an integral ecology, including an ecotheology (Roussel 2018). Georgetown University in Washington has Teilhard de Chardin’s prophetic statement in bold letters at the entrance to the international pavilion for students’ meetings: “The time of nations is over; now, if we do not want to perish, we must build the Earth”. The current return of nationalism in the America First or Brexit mode appears more like the aftershocks of a past with no future, which end up accentuating the “world disorder” (Latour 2020; Bandeira 2016).

3.2. Theological Places Today

What do a planetary ecological theology and a theology of liberation of indigenous peoples, specifically the Palestinian people, have in common today? This is what we present here. It is urgent to adopt a Theology of Creation and New Creation with the epistemological criteria of the LTh.

Nowadays the world map is no longer known to new generations as it has been shaped over the last two centuries. The traditional map expresses the planet shaped by national divisions in different colors, with their borders. In some cases, such as on the colonized African continent, there are borders in straight lines, drawn in the metropolises. But new generations come into contact with the planet through satellite photos: a round earth, with blue waters and atmosphere dotted with white clouds, and interspersed with continuous green areas and desert lands, without political borders. That is what we really see, that is what we have and what we are: a very small planet in a galaxy of the immense universe, but big enough for humanity, a land that can only be understood with a generous gaze like Teilhard de Chardin’s and, even more so, by the crossing of multiple gazes. Ecology needs to precede politics and the Church itself, even in terms of theology. It is the first theological place.

Ecotheology has drawn on the growing resources of interdisciplinarity to join the basic principles of LTh epistemology. Instead of social classes or peoples or just the weakest and most vulnerable human identities, the option is more comprehensive, it is for all threatened creatures, right down to the microorganisms in the seas and mountains, the biotic and abiotic elements of the earth that make it possible for the earth to be a habitable home and a living, healthy organism. If God is the biblical God of life, the “Living God”, his glory is not only manifested in the “living human” (St. Irenaeus), but in all forms of life. A theology of life that encompasses the whole earth and even its great negentropy, the sun, has a great connection with Scripture, as well as with other mythical creation traditions.5 If we have no control over solar storms, we are nevertheless responsible for the balance of life on earth, we are the ethical curvature of the earth, and a theology of human dignity connected to the creaturely dignity of all forms of existence, a connection that entails an ethical responsibility, is vital in this time of increasing extreme climate events.

An ecotheology, precisely in its holism, cannot be disconnected from the diverse circles that weave life on earth: a theology of peoples, i.e., ethnic, which considers the vulnerability and also the power. Above all autochthonous peoples, both native and transplanted, cultures and identities with their own vitality, and their ways of reproducing life, vital relationships that form families, both human families and permacultural families, i.e., families woven from relationships of diverse biotic beings—humans, animals, plants—with abiotic elements, minerals, water, etc., that make up the environment and its life cycles. Just as in the universe time and space are vectors of the same reality, our history and geography cannot be separated. The theology of history, which is so important for LTh, must necessarily incorporate a theology of geography, of territories, in other words, the theology of Creation with the epistemology of LTh.

The problem of Creation is us, humanity. The cultivation of kinship, as studied in anthropology, is kept healthy by its openness to hospitality, to recognition, with welcome and integration. This applies to humans and other living beings. And it must have a room in a theology of integral liberation, which helps to understand current migratory mobility and devastated populations. The mythical narratives of the origins of peoples, including the biblical Genesis, and their promise of destiny in eschatological myths, including the Apocalypse, still demand greater attention on the agenda of LTh, which, for historical reasons, has paid attention to the Exodus paradigm of liberation, the so-called historical biblical books and the historical Jesus.

Nonetheless, there is a tendency to form a tremendous theological place, the fruit of the planetary history of the last few centuries: the immense mass of humanity left over, something more scandalous than the persistent two-thirds of humanity that is poor, now not just in the global south but all over the planet. The fact is that the current stage of technology—which has imposed itself as a technocracy (Laudato Si’ 101ff.)—with the big bang of computing, the internet, the digital world and operational and generative artificial intelligence, biotechnology and widespread robotics, is a technological leap allied—as history teaches—to the manipulation of power and the quest for domination. In the near future, there could be not only a planetary catastrophe due to growing inequality but also the absurdity of a huge percentage of humanity not having a job or a resource to get their bread, the minimum to live on—an incalculable mass left over to be controlled and put into reserve. If we did not even imagine a few decades ago the effects of extreme climate events that we are already experiencing, the effects of finding ourselves with the majority of humanity no longer having enough resources to live on are still unimaginable. Until now, humanity has suffered from poverty due to shortages in more regionalized situations and where shortages could be alleviated in simpler ways. Now, paradoxically, in a society of excesses rather than shortages, only money, that is becoming increasingly sophisticated, and solidarity, which is also becoming increasingly sophisticated in its institutions, are able to provide relief from poverty, relief which is being met with ever greater difficulties, as can be seen in the large population migrations caused by conflicts of interest over resources, as in the case of Congo or Sudan, and by the desperate search for new opportunities through migration.

The “Final Solution”, in this plausible apocalyptic scenario, would be to find some way of managing the chaos by turning entire peoples into the living dead, as Primo Levi tells us in If this is a Man, his account of the Auschwitz extermination camp (Levi 2013). Once again, is it the triumph of “absolute evil”, now on a planetary scale? Is it not important to anticipate this funereal theological place, the death of God with the ethical and biological death of the human species, the silence and death of all theology? Anticipating and searching, in a heuristic that hopes to find, in such a way that an ethical cry and good news still open the way to hope and a theology of the God of life, is this not the most urgent task of an LTh?

Concretely, the greatest, most agonizing test of humanity and an LTh, at this very moment and in the near future, around which all wars and regional conflicts are mirrored and decided, where life and death confront each other, where the banality of evil and absolute evil merge, is the agonizing cry of the Palestinian people in Gaza, agony on display for all of humanity to see. If the Holocaust and Auschwitz have become a paradigmatic challenge for thinking about an honest European theology, the Palestinian Nakbah since 1948 and specifically Gaza in this time of necrophilia and destruction in plain sight, under the arms of major powers and the apathy of European governments, have become a paradigm for thinking about an honest planetary theology, for what could put us before attempts at “final solutions” and regional eliminations in a progressive but ultimately planetary way. It is not a question of delusional catastrophism, because the model is happening, it is being rehearsed, before our eyes.

A “theology of Palestinian liberation” means concretely thinking about mercy and hope together with the liberation of the whole planet. No horizon smaller or more concrete than this is now possible. It is the most radical of the projects that involve agony and death. The others, like the suffering of Ukraine, Congo and Sudan, are the suffering of peoples subjected to ambitions for natural resources. In Gaza, it is the suffering of a people abandoned in the face of a project of progressive annihilation, without any of the empires taking an interest and coming to their aid. The Nakbah that continues to this day is, once again, the appearance of the “absolute evil” that infects the whole earth, those who suffer it and those who impose it, without anyone being able to say, in this time saturated with information, “I didn’t know”. The confrontation of terrorisms that produce senseless and contagious death needs to be discerned and distinguished: on the one hand, the terrorism of desperation for political solutions and which has ended up loving death more than life, which goes to death producing the maximum amount of death. And on the other hand, the terrorism of the state, and therefore of a nation, which organizes death and orders the killing not out of desperation but with state power and ideological alibis, such as defense, without first seeing its own continuous and progressive aggression. Or even the ideological use of sacred texts for legitimation. Not to think of such events theologically would be a betrayal on LTh’s part. For the World Forum on Theology and Liberation, held in February 2024 in Kathmandu, this is what is required from LTh (Raheb 2023).

4. The “Principle of Liberation” and Its Two Twin Brothers

The liberation movement, and with it, the liberating thought, cannot fulfill its mission on its own. It needs, the liberation principle to join the principle of mercy and the principle of hope. Through the intervention of Pope Francis, for the “principle of mercy”, Jon Sobrino (2020) and Walter Kasper (2015) have given two complementary treatments. And the principle of hope, for which Moltmann (2023) has a theological version of Ernest Bloch’s Prinzip Hoffnung, is motivation for Jubilee 2025: spes non confundit (Rm 5,5). The three principles have gained not only prominence but operational power, which is, according philosophical tradition, typical of a “first principle”, capable of moving from potency to action. The “principle of liberation”, which has driven LTh since its inception, is present not only in the speeches but in the postures, decisions and symbolic gestures of this first Latin American Pope, who has known this post-conciliar theology from inside and from its beginning. What remains as a precious legacy of the Pope for the future of LTh, beyond his fraternal embraces to Gustavo Gutierrez and Jon Sobrino, beyond his meetings with social movements from the global south, beyond his gestures and his own “liberating freedom”, is his recurring word around the three theological principles that arise from the evangelical source of Jesus himself: mercy, liberation, hope. Pope Francis has unfolded these three principles over the twelve years of his pontificate.

If mercy, liberation and hope were only virtues to be exercised, we could still see their intrinsic relationships in the scholastic exposition that teaches, for each virtue, its “auxiliaries”. Or, as St. Francis of Assisi teaches in a short text praising the virtues: whoever has one, has all; whoever despises one already has none (Fontes 2004). But they are not simply powers of the human soul, they are theological principles that come from God himself, and for this reason they are called theological virtues and are firstly divine gifts: God has mercy and hope for his Creation, and for this reason he is also a God who liberates: from slavery, from the grave, and creates new life, ultimately because he is “the lover of life” (cf. Wis 11:26). The life that insists on manifesting itself in the various cultural forms of resistance—in solidarity, in dance, even in tears—bears witness to the unity of the three principles, each containing the other and containing the totality of the Gospel.

In his Le Porche du Mystère de la deuxième vertu (Péguy 1975), Charles Péguy (1873–1914) describes hope as a little sister, still in her teens, who walks hand in hand with her two older sisters: faith, committed and careful in her fidelity to her husband, and charity, the generous mother of many children. The little hope walks in the middle: faith, hope and charity. But she is not being led by the adults, she is always a step ahead, and—on closer inspection—we can see that it is she, the virtue for tomorrow, for the future, who removes the two biggest ones from the risk of paralysis and deadly rigidity in the present time. The principle hope, with dreams on the horizon and non-conformity with the current state of things, is what drives history, as Ernest Bloch himself concluded in his exile during the Second World War. Now Pope Francis is strengthening LTh with his insistence on hope, a reserve of joy and energy that cannot be robbed by present events. It is a way of living resurrection in advance, as the last word of the Living God on all of life.

The principle of mercy, in turn, reaches the founding experience of the Samaritan in Luke 10, of the shepherd and the father of the lost son in Luke 15, from where the energy for the struggles of liberation springs and overcomes the temptation of a theology reduced to the rationality of faith by a theologia cordis, an intellectus amoris. Without mercy to shape it, theology would be lost in the harshness of the struggles, it would risk becoming like what it needs to fight. But mercy has its supreme test in the cross, in fidelity and in standing by the cross, according to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s acute expression: many die on crosses; to stand by the cross—the many crosses—that is to be Christian. Or as Unamuno’s fundamental concept of congoja inspires: before the Pietà with the dead Christ in his arms and on his bosom, it is mercy that participates, still alive, like a congoja, in the most tragic hours, “co-angst” of the Dolorosa, who meets her Son on the path and accompanies him to the cross, eyes still open and immersed in the congoja, sharing the anguish and darkness of death. However, it is necessary to add: mercy also takes the crucified from the cross in the ultimate act of pietà on earth: care for the dead, pious burial, according to human dignity. The theology that thinks about the congoja of the world and of God in the world is necessarily in agony, which is what justifies the title of this article and the proof of an entirely Christian theology.

But it is the principle of liberation that, in the end, always and again leads to the dangerous, uncomfortable, disturbing front, where those who think and clarify paths of liberation for the ecclesial and social movements will be persecuted, defamed and finally mistreated, as predicted in the testimony of the prophets and promised in the Beatitudes. It is in these struggles for liberation that the truth, including the truth of hope and mercy, is tested and verified, a truth that is always again in conflict and “crucified”. The question, given the magnitude of today’s global threats, the growing fascist cynicism, the imminence of new suffering, is about the power of a liberating thought, especially LTh, which cannot lose the tenderness of mercy or the joviality of hope. It is an ethical power, to be sure, but without ontological support, without logical and logistical weapons. LTh’s mission is to think according to the most archaic origins of thinking in Latin languages—thinking wounds, to care and to heal wounds—and to persevere in the midst of the pain and the cry. It is a theology of the cross, of crucified peoples, of humiliated groups, always in agony.

In his encyclical letter Fratelli Tutti, Chapter VIII, Pope Francis made a fundamental intuition from the Gospels explicit for our time of intense globalization: if fraternity is what ultimately matters between human beings and God’s creatures—and what ultimately honors God more than anything else—then religious traditions, as paths of search and encounter, have the potential and vocation to surpass themselves in this greatest sign of the Kingdom of God: fraternity. It can and should be said in other ways, according to different religious traditions, but the ultimate value of fraternity among all creatures is a high consensus among the various traditions. LTh corresponds to this potential and vocation in a realistic way: passing through the paths of economics, politics, gender and ethnic identities, historical cultures, in short, everything that is human, armed with the triple principles—mercy, hope and liberation—LTh is a thought in agonistic struggle for fraternity in the freedom of the sons and daughters of God.

5. Conclusions

The LTh, like the Renouveau Théologique movement—later called Nouvelle Théologie—took on the responsibility of dialoguing with contemporary sciences, especially the humanities. The French were pioneers in dialoguing with psychoanalysis, the Germans with philosophy, the Belgians with history. Dialogues with anthropology, politics and economics, as well as with literature, especially biblical literature, have enriched the contemporary spectrum of theology. LTh listens, accompanies, learns and also selects, using as a selection criterion what helps in the processes of liberation. That is why it also follows theoretical options and priorities, those that are close to the cry for liberation. All theology must speak of God, of course, but it knows that God is ineffable, and so it must respectfully preserve the apophatic condition of its discourse. Thus, scholasticism itself teaches that God is not really said to be what he is but what he is not. We learn who God is not from his essence but from the place of his revelation: not who he is but from where he reveals himself. It is the narrative of his intervention on the path of the people and ultimately of his incarnation—God of Nazareth, of Palestine, crucified and risen—that we can think about and update: Where is God revealed today according to the grammar of the Gospels?

What future and effectiveness can LTh have? It makes explicit more crucially—more agonically—than any other theology a paradoxical experience for logic, stated enigmatically by Hölderlin in the first stanza of his poem Patmos: Nah ist, und schwer zu fassen, der Gott. Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch (God is near, and difficult to understand. But where there is danger, there also grows that which saves). LTh is a theology for the Kingdom of God when, with its epistemological principles, it theologically enhances a more dignified existence for every creature. It is a theology of the God of the Kingdom when, in contexts of danger and pain, announcements of death, it is a word that remains at the foot of the cross, in kenosis and abandonment, God stripped bare, therefore fully revealed in his nakedness with hope in the resurrection. Revelation is the desire of all theological knowledge. Revelation in the nakedness of poverty and the cross is the scandal of all theological knowledge. But it is transformed into song and dance in the middle of the night, in the firm hope of the dawn, the morning of the resurrection.